Harvest of Rage

On April 19, 1995, a Ryder truck filled with fenilizer and racing fuel explodedoutside the Alfred P. Murrah Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 peo­ple and wounding 500 others. Harvest of Rage is an extremely readable and informative attempt to placethis brutal terrorist attack within the context of Christian fundamentalism,right-wing politics, and the dramatic decline in the living standards ofAmerica’s rural population. Joel Dyer is the editor of the Boulder Weekly andhas written many investigative features on the farm crisis and the rise of theradical right. He begins by stating two themes that govern his book the reluctanceof most Americans to recognize the existence of numerous terroristorganizations within America itself and the increasing tendency of thesegroups to use violence to achieve their aims.While the smoke was still clearing from America’s most infamous terroristattack, all eyes looked across the Ocean for answers. The national media beganto explore which faraway terrorists were likely culprits. After all, this wasOklahoma City, the middle of the American heartland, and only the mind ofsome foreign murderer could have conceived such a bloodthirsty plot.But in Oklahoma and around the nation, FBI agents were looking across ourown Oceans of wheat, corn, and barley for their answers. They weren’t raidingthe homes of Palestinian nationals or people born in Imq or Iran. Within hoursof the blast, they were questioning men and women who had attended meetingson how to stop farm foreclosures or on how to return the country to a constitutionalrepublic (p. 1).Harvest of Rage is divided into three parts: “Fertile Ground,” “The Seeds ofInfluence,” and “The Harvest,” all three of which share with the book‘s title anindebtedness to organic metaphors. This reliance on organic imagery is a majorfeature of Dyer’s book; the once-rich lands of the American heartland, heimplies, are now fertile grounds only for terrorism. “Fertile Ground” examinesthe disastrous impact of recent government policies on America’s rural population,the subsequent disenchantment with conventional government, and thesubsequent allure of organizations which respond to this growing dissatisfactionand anger. “The Seeds of Influence” focuses on the nature and beliefs ofthese numerous, primarily right-wing Christian groups which have proliferatedthroughout rural America in recent years, in particular those influenced by“Christian Identity” beliefs. ‘The Harvest” examines the bitter disputes concerningthe meaning of the American Constitution and the increasing relianceof America’s disaffected rural population on common-law courts. Dyer is, ofcourse, a journalist, and the book’s audience is the educated general reader. Attimes, Harvest of Rage is a little too lushly written, but the reader is never leftin doubt as to the seriousness of the author‘s subject: “We will continue to paythe price-one building, one pipe bomb, one bumeddown church at a timeuntilwe come to understand, first, that the nation is holding a loaded gun to its ...